Inner Sleeves: Ajit Chauhan & Coracle Nestjob

Inner Sleeves brings together recent work by Ajit Chauhan and Coracle
Nestjob, two artists from the San Francisco Bay Area. Chauhan’s drawings are
made by erasing selected portions of record album covers in precise geometric
patterns. By using a found surface and palette, Chauhan’s creative scope is
fundamentally limited; however, within these givens, he derives a fantastic
range of oscillating and pulsating fields. The patterns, which call to mind the
formalist abstractions of Bridget Riley and the dynamic art of the Brasilian
neoconcrete movement, might also be seen as expressing the musical vibrations
embedded within the records themselves. Indeed, Chauhan’s method of erasing
to reveal an image, which recalls on the one hand the classical trope of
sculpture as a process of removing material to find an inner essence, also
echoes the industrial method of producing vinyl records by scoring into a flat
surface.

Nestjob’s shirt collages were initially inspired by George Schneeman
(1934–2009) and Joe Brainard (1941–1994), who had both made drawings of
plaid work shirts. Nestjob was attracted to the unpretentious simplicity and
everyday poetic resonance of these images. His first shirt collage was made from
cut up pieces of a reproduction of one of Chauhan’s erased album covers.
Nestjob’s re-use of Chauhan’s work—itself dependent on found
material—evokes the innovative frugality of a gleaner, a squatter, and a
thrift-store shopper. As that first work evolved into a series, Nestjob explored
a wide range of materials and effects, always preserving the image of a work
shirt and maintaining an intimate, almost miniature scale. In many of the
collages, the shirt blends into the background as if camouflaged. The modesty of
the scale and the images’ virtual disappearance is balanced by a precision and
radiance that recalls the marvelous flash of a Japanese noh robe.